ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / As telemetry transport systems move inexorably closer to a unified telemetry-over-IP approach, the operators and engineers who have traditionally deferred to a separate communications group can benefit from a more comprehensive understanding of the intricacies of the transport medium and protocol. Ethernet, and more specifically IP network hardware, has gained increased robustness, as well as much of the reliability enhancing functionality of more venerable transport solutions, but with these increasingly integrated feature sets comes an emphasized demand on the telemetry systems operator to be able to configure the telemetry transport network devices in more dynamic environments. This paper will seek to serve as a handbook for the telemetry community, guiding discussions of the strengths, weaknesses, legacy, and future outlook of this transport methodology both within and without the groups involved in most range telemetry transport environments.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The integrated Network-Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) project has developed standards for network-based telemetry systems. While these standards are based largely on the existing body of commercial networking protocols, the Telemetry Network System (TmNS) has more stringent performance requirements in the areas of latency, throughput, operation over constrained links, and quality of service (QoS) than typical networked applications. A variety of initial evaluations were undertaken to exercise the interfaces of the current standards and determine real-world performance. The core end-to-end performance initial evaluations focus collectively on the movement of telemetry data through the TmNS. These initial evaluations addressed two areas: end-to-end data delivery and parametric data extraction. This paper presents the approach taken by these ongoing efforts and provides initial results. The latest results will be presented at ITC 2010.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Bidirectional networked radio frequency (RF) communications between the ground and test articles are quickly becoming a normal mode of operation. Not only can devices be remotely controlled, but other networking technologies are emerging into flight test. Voice over IP (VoIP) is ubiquitous in the workplace and in homes, but it presents unique challenges when used to communicate between test articles. This paper presents some issues to be considered and test results to help aid deployment of VoIP systems in network-based test systems such as iNET's Telemetry Network System (TmNS).

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / In the past several years there has been a good amount of effort expended in migrating telemetry streams to IP-based infrastructure, especially in the area of ground-based transport. This has yielded a number of benefits, from leveraging the properties of IP transport to enable multicast transport, to the integration of the wide number of COTS equipment that also is IP-based, such as digital video encoder/decoders into range networks. This paper will provide a model for identifying areas to accelerate the integration of IP-based assets into the range infrastructure at the application level. In particular the integration of metadata between the telemetry and video application interfaces will be explored.

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The expected efficiency of network-based telemetry systems vs. the tried and true PCM-based approaches is a debated topic. This paper chooses to use a lighthearted voice to pull the two sides of the "war" to a table of negotiation based on metrics. Ultimately, focusing on metrics that truly define efficiency is the key to understanding the varying points of view. A table of these metrics along with the "why and when" criteria for their use is presented based on historic mathematical information theory, true flight test data requirements, and lab analysis. With these metrics, the negotiation and reasonable compromises in the war may become clear. In other words, this paper attempts to provide a methodology that can be used by the community to aid in choosing the appropriate (or good enough) technologies for current and future telemetry testing demands.

The growth of network-based systems in flight test will present performance problems within the community. Legacy instrumentation systems are not capable of meeting the high-bandwidth, low latency data processing requirements of these next generation data acquisition systems. Ongoing research at Southwest Research Institute is exploring the use of a variety of commodity components, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and multicore Central Processing Units (CPUs), in ways that can be applied to both the small embedded components as well as the larger ground systems. This paper will explore an open, scalable Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) approach to bridge the gap and minimize changes to the legacy systems. Current results from this approach will be presented at the conference.

The integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) radios provide a two-way telemetry link that interconnects the airborne instrumentation system with ground-based systems. This capability brings the flight test telemetry domain into the realm of the more classic mesh networks in a mobile ad-hoc environment. The underlying radio frequency (RF) communication protocols defined in the iNET standards support a variety of classic networking protocols. The scheduling algorithms between Link Managers and radios can operate as a collision network, like classic Ethernet. This paper describes the communication protocols and scheduling algorithms of the iNET radios, and it provides results of their use in a self-scheduling algorithm such as a classical token ring network.

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Network-based telemetry systems have unprecedented amounts of flexibility due to the ability to manipulate configuration during a test. As a result of this flexibility, multiple tests can be conducted in a single flight; all it takes is reconfiguration of instrumentation. However, configuration of devices can be a complex task, and dynamic configuration can be even more daunting. As such, device configuration, control, and status must be managed in a coordinated fashion. A system manager implementation that performs coordinated status and control of instrumentation in the Test Article as well as test configuration authoring is presented in this paper, the Ground Test Article Manager (GTAM), which is being developed by the integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / The initial efforts that resulted in the migration of range application traffic to an IP infrastructure largely focused on the challenge of obtaining reliable transport for range application streams including telemetry and digital video via IP packet-based network technology. With the emergence of architectural elements that support robust Quality of Service, multicast routing, and redundant operation, these problems have largely been resolved, and a large number of ranges are now successfully utilizing IP-based network topology to implement their backbone transport infrastructure. The attention now turns to the need to provide supplemental features that provide enhanced functionality in addition to raw stream transport. These features include: *Stream monitoring and native test capability, usually called Service Assurance *Extended support for Ancillary Data / Metadata *Archive and Media Asset Management integration into the workflow *Temporal alignment of application streams This paper will describe a number of methods to implement these features utilizing an approach that leverages the features offered by IP-based technology, emphasizes the use of standards-based COTS implementations, and supports interworking between features.